Subscribe
  • Home
  • /
  • Hardware
  • /
  • Optimise data centre cooling with effective control systems

Optimise data centre cooling with effective control systems


Johannesburg, 24 Jul 2017
Optimize Data Center Cooling with Effective Control Systems.
Optimize Data Center Cooling with Effective Control Systems.

Growing energy cost and environmental responsibility have placed the data centre industry under increasing pressure to improve its energy efficiency. Of all data centre energy consumption, the cooling system typically consumes the second largest portion (the first being IT equipment). For example, assume a 1MW data centre with a PUE of 1.91 at 50% IT load (see sidebar for more assumptions), the cooling system consumes about 36% of the energy used by the entire data centre (including IT equipment) and about 75% of the energy used by the physical infrastructure (without IT equipment) to support the IT applications.

Given its large energy footprint, optimising the cooling system provides a significant opportunity to reduce energy costs. There are three high-level tasks used to establish an efficient cooling system for a new data centre design, which are discussed in next section.

This paper focuses only on one of these three tasks - adopt effective cooling control systems. We investigate the challenges of data centre cooling, why traditional cooling controls do not work, and what is an effective cooling control system. Finally, we describe four cooling control levels, when they should be used, the benefits and limitations of each level, and provide examples of each.

Share